The Trump administration is prompting many of us in health services to ask new questions about if, and how, to draw lines between our personal and professional endeavors. Do we sign that petition with our institutional affiliation? Do we retweet that tweet? Do we share news of that protest on the established mailing list? As someone who studies organizational ethics, these individual-level questions soon give way to a larger set of questions about the roles and responsibilities of the institutions within which we spend so much of our professional lives. In a moment in which the role of institutions appears critically important, what does it mean to be a just institution?

Recently, local leaders have shone light on this question. Over a weekend of protests in January, Harvard Business School faculty member Ariel Dora Stern (an expert in management of innovation in health care) imagined aloud about how to prioritize her academic responsibility to a journal and her social responsibilities to her community. The tweet accrued nearly two thousand retweets and replies from fellow faculty including “Isn’t that the truth?” and “I’m in the same boat.” One response asked whether the journal had issued a formal statement against an executive order, suggesting that if it had not, Professor Stern should no longer be willing to review. Read More

Here in Boston, cooperation between health care providers is a fraught issue.

Competition is fierce among local, not-for-profit teaching hospitals, and the idea of collaboration brings to mind collusion, mergers and monopolies.

Unfortunately, these concerns may be keeping Boston hospitals from pursuing cost-effective strategies to meet federal tax-exemption requirements and improve community health. Over the next year, each of Boston’s 12 hospitals will have to conduct a community health needs assessment (CHNA) to retain their tax-free status. New requirements in the Affordable Care Act specifically encourage collaboration between hospitals and with other health care agencies, such as public health departments.

We argue that doing one, citywide CHNA presents a rare opportunity for high-value, low-commitment coordination among Boston hospitals. Read More

A slew of organizations, including most notably the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, are talking about creating a “culture of health” as a new way forward in US health policy. The underlying thinking assumes that legislative fixes, including the Affordable Care Act, will continue to be vehemently fought if attitudes towards health do not in some ways fundamentally change. Inherent in the idea of building a culture is incorporating unconventional actors and voices into discussions about how to improve outcomes at a local level. This has led public health strategists to ask new questions about who to involve in community health building efforts with an eye towards employers, small businesses, social service organizations and community institutions.

With this in mind, I recently spoke with Peter Doliber, Executive Director of the Alliance of Massachusetts YMCA about how he sees the Ys fitting into a plan to create health. His background is in public health and hospital administration, having worked in a range of communities to develop programs that increase access to health care, improve health outcomes and create a return on investment. Here’s an abbreviated version of our conversation.

Last week, I had the opportunity to speak at the 10th Annual Summit of the National Center for Medical Legal Partnership in McLean, Virginia. The summit brought together more than 400 people working to “mainstream” medical legal partnerships (MLPs). The theory of change is that through these partnerships, the health care sector can begin to more systematically address social, behavioral and environmental determinants of health. Particularly on behalf of patients who are low-income, legal professionals address root causes of illness by working with utilities companies, landlords, social service agencies and the court system.

Concretely, MLPs are programs in which civil legal aid agencies, health care organizations and public health departments cooperate to train their staffs, treat individuals and identify population level problems. Most often, it is civil legal aid agencies that provide expertise in the laws around housing and public benefits, and spend their resources to ensure access to housing subsidies, food benefits, health insurance and employment. Some law firms also contribute pro bono time to the cause, as do some law schools in the form of clinics.

Essentially what’s happened is that Florida has instituted a headgear rule ahead of the sport’s national governing body. Florida made this decision in advance of this season based on statistics that show that female lacrosse players experience the fifth-highest rate of concussions of any high school athlete. If you’ve ever held a lacrosse ball, this won’t surprise you.

Still, it is not immediately clear what the actual rate of concussions is in Florida. Identifying girls lacrosse as coming in 5th place doesn’t help the reader judge how pervasive the risk really is if we consider that there could be large gaps between the ordinal rankings. Florida officials have suggested that if even one injury is prevented by the introduction of headgear, the rule would be worth it. I’m not sure I’m so risk-averse. Read More

A new New England Journal of Medicine commentary by Peter A. Ubel, M.D., David A. Comerford, Ph.D., and Eric Johnson, Ph.D. highlights significant flaws in the way information is presented to insurance shoppers on state and federal exchange websites. The authors present original survey data to support the argument that subtle aspects of current website designs inappropriately bias decision making. The authors make their case most strongly in an analysis of the well-known gold, silver and bronze labels:

Consider the decision to lump health plans into categories with names such as bronze (for low monthly premiums and high out-of-pocket costs) and gold (for higher monthly premiums and lower out-of-pocket costs). These labels could have unintended effects on people’s attitudes toward which plans are best. After all, gold, silver, and bronze convey best, second best, and third best through association with sporting events, but the best plan for one enrollee will be different from the best plan for another.

To test whether such associations might influence people’s perceptions of insurance plans, two of us recruited a convenience sample of participants from public buses in Durham, North Carolina, and asked them which category of plans they would look at first if they were shopping for health insurance. To half the people, we described the gold plans as having higher monthly premiums and lower out-of-pocket costs — the language used by many exchanges. For the other half, we switched the gold and bronze plans, describing the gold plans as having lower monthly premiums and higher out-of-pocket costs.

In recognition of how little we talk about global health, I am turning my attention back to my roots for today’s post.

On Jan 22nd, Bill and Melinda Gates launched their annual letter. For those readers who live fully under a domestic health policy rock, Bill and Melinda Gates are co-chairs of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which donated more than $1 billion in 2013 to global health activities. Aside from that enormous sum, the foundation is commonly looked upon as an example of what strategic philanthropy can do.

The 2015 Annual Letter, launched on January 22nd, resembles previous letters insomuch as it strikes an optimistic tone about the progress made to date and makes bold claims about the future impact of the foundation. Specifically, the Gates’ tell us that they are aiming to have impact in four areas in the next 15 years – health, farming, banking and education. In the area of health, the letter specifies a focus on several specific projects, including cutting the number of children who die before 5, reducing the number of women who die in childbirth, wiping polio and three other diseases out entirely, finding the secret to the destruction of malaria and forcing HIV to a tipping point.

For our purposes, what’s most interesting about the letter is what it doesn’t say. It makes no mention of law or policy and makes only passing reference to regulation and governance. What is this about?

The piece has already been commented upon by several smart people, most recently Kay Lazar of the Boston Globe. Just one day after Ornstein’s piece went to press, the Dean of Harvard Medical School Jeffrey Flier (@jflier) tweeted “How could this be allowed to happen?” only to be informed by the Chair of Surgery at Boston Medical Center, Gerard Doherty, (@GerardDoherty4) that three Harvard-affiliated hospitals are in fact currently hosting camera crews for a similar series. The ensuing conversation reminded me just how limited a platform Twitter is for tricky conversations about health care law and ethics. So I did what any self-respecting millennial would do – I went home for the holidays and asked my mom to help me understand what the internet couldn’t.

In each piece, Keirns outlines the challenges she faced in vaginally delivering her son in a hospital environment that seemed committed to performing a caesarian section. Particularly given Keirns’ expertise in and familiarity with health care, the lack of patient-centered care in the story is striking. Several staff suggested that surgery was a foregone conclusion while others appeared unprepared for her son’s long-awaited arrival.

Population health advocates have identified health care providers, and hospitals in particular, as key allies in the effort to create better health and longer lives for Americans nationwide. Despite a growing interest in “community-based’ models of care, hospitals remain the most visible component of the US health care system. What’s more, hospitals are where the money, not to mention many of leading brains and cultural authority, reside. Of the 17.4% of GDP that the United States invests in health care, roughly 30% goes to hospitals – more than any other spending category. Hence why people interested in population health wish to have hospitals on board as they aim to address the always-challenging social, behavior and environmental determinants of health.

But the question remains open: do hospitals really have a role in the pursuit of population health? Read More